Seth is a business intelligence and decision systems expert. He is founding chair of the Text Analytics Summit and principal consultant at Washington, D.C., based Alta Plana Corporation. Seth consults, writes, and speaks on information-systems strategy, data management and analysis systems, IT industry trends, and emerging analytical technologies. Seth chairs the Sentiment Analysis Symposium and the Text Analytics Summit.

Sentiment, mood, opinion, and emotion play a central role in social and online media, enterprise feedback, and the range of consumer, business, and public data sources. Together with connection, expressed as influence and advocacy in and across social and business networks, they capture immense business value.

"Human Analytics" solutions unlock this value and are the focus of the next Sentiment Analysis Symposium, March 6, 2014 in New York. The Call for Speakers is now open, through October 28.

The key to a great conference is great speakers. Whether you're a business visionary, experienced user, or technologist, please consider proposing a presentation. Submit your proposal at sentimentsymposium.com/call-for-speakers.html. Choose from among the suggested topics or surprise us.

The New York symposium will be the 7th, covering solutions that measure and exploit emotion, attitude, opinion, and connection in online, social, and enterprise sources. It will be a great program... with your participation!

2) I'm planning two conferences for the first half of 2014, the first in New York in late February or early March, the second in Paris on June 2-3. I've set up a short market-research survey. Please share your thoughts on topics & speakers, conference format, and the conference name. I would really like to break away from the "sentiment analysis" label, which is too narrow for the many topics, in business-applied analytical computing, that the symposium already covers. Would you please help by completing the survey. It's anonymous, unless you choose to volunteer your name, and should take no more than 3 minutes.

Please contact me if you have questions regarding the conferences, and as always, I welcome contact from people with interesting stories or challenges in the text / content / social analytics and BI spaces. Do get in touch!

The Sentiment Analysis Symposium takes place next week, May 7-8 2013, in New York. This is a business-focused conference with strong academic/research, practitioner, and industry participation. The focus is technologies that mine emotions, opinions, and attitudes from social, online, and enterprise sources, for analysis in conjunction with other social, transactional, personal, and business-operations data.

We offer a 50% discount to academic & government attendees (registration code GOVACAD) and have a special rate for full-time students, $100 for the symposium and $50 for each of the optional sessions (contact sas (at) altaplana.com).

We've announced the program for the May 8, 2013 Sentiment Analysis Symposium in New York -- a program that "will feature industry-leading speakers and panelists from Bloomberg, IBM, PayPal, Vision Critical, and Westat, start-ups, and academia, covering social media and social intelligence" -- "for Customer Experience, Finance, Healthcare, Market Research, Media." Plus we have four great sponsors so far, Bloomberg, Gnip,Lexalytics, and Converseon, with others pending.

Join us!

The symposium is designed for businesses that want to lead the competition -- in customer satisfaction and support, brand and reputation management, financial services, product design and marketing, and an array of other business processes -- for those who understand the advantage they will gain in understanding customer, market, employee, investor, and political sentiment, emotion, mood, and opinion.

The symposium will be preceded, on May 7, 2013, by an optional, half-day Research & Innovation session that will explore cutting-edge industry initiatives, and by an optional, half-day Practical Sentiment Analysis tutorial, designed for advanced business users, software developers, and solution providers. The tutorial will be presented by Prof. Ronen Feldman of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Prof. Feldman is a pioneer in the development and application of data mining and text analytics technologies to solve Big Data problems in finance, marketing, and social media.

The symposium kicks off with talks covering a range of sentiment analysis applications:

Professor VS Subrahmanian of the University of Maryland will speak on "Sentiment and Signals," providing a leading researcher's view on the use of sentiment and semantic analysis and data mining for government, industry, and intelligence.

PayPal Director of Customer Advocacy Han-Sheong Lai will describe how PayPal applied advanced technologies to boost revenue and decrease call volume and cost in a talk on "Customer Experience Improvement."

Amelia Burke-Garcia of research-firm Westat will speak on identification of "Health Influencers to Impact Health Behavior."

Registration is online at sentimentsymposium.com/registration.html. A Super Early registration discount runs through February 8, 2013. (We also have a 50% government/academic discount and a special low rate for full-time students.)

The Sentiment Analysis Symposium series has drawn steadily growing numbers, at three New York symposium and two San Francisco symposiums held since 2010. (Videos of talks at earlier symposiums are available for free access at the symposium Web site.) The symposium both builds on past success and aims to stay on the leading edge of sentiment technologies and applications. The symposium showcases ground-breaking sentiment-analysis applications and provides unique learning opportunities.

Other distinguished May 8 include David Rabjohns, CEO of MotiveQuest, a social intelligence company; market research innovator Leonard Murphy, founder of Gen2 Advisors; Sean Reckwerdt from Networked Insights, speaking on Social TV; Realeyes Managing Director Mihkel J√§√§tma, speaking on "Facial Recognition for Emotion Detection"; Prof. Philip Resnik of the Univ. of Maryland, on real-time polling; Dr. Catherine Havasi, of the MIT Media Lab and founder of start-up Luminso, on cross-lingual sentiment analysis; and Hal Bloom from Sage and Lindsey Sanford from the Bernard Hodes Group.

To maximize networking opportunities, the symposium will once again feature evening-before and post-symposium receptions.

The New York symposium will be the 6th, covering solutions that measure and exploit emotions, attitudes, and opinions in online, social, and enterprise sources. We typically have both research/academic and business user presentations and participation.

Whether you're an experienced user or technologist, please consider proposing a presentation. Submit your proposal, by December 17, 2012, at sentimentsymposium.com/call-for-speakers.html. Choose from among the suggested topics listed there or submit on a topic of your choice.